For a moment, Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign looked like a go. But the numbers weren’t adding up. After a grim meeting with his advisers Friday, and a weekend to lay the last of his long-held White House dreams to rest, the former New York mayor told them Monday it was over.

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His decision not to run was a reality check in an election cycle that’s become a reality show: if a viable candidate with $40 billion and nothing but his ego and reputation to lose can’t find a path in one of the most tumultuous election cycles ever, a real third-party presidential campaign might be an impossibility.

In Bloomberg’s case, he concluded that he’d lose on Election Day — or lose later in the House of Representatives. Either way, he decided, it would probably put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Also dead: Bloomberg’s White House ambitions, an every-four-years flirtation that’s become almost a tired joke in the political world. He’ll be 78 in 2020.

“It weighed on him,” said one person familiar with the planning, “but at the end of the day, the fact that this was probably the last shot wasn’t enough to make him want to do it.”

That also probably means the effective end of Bloomberg within politics. He’s still got his super PAC and he doesn’t want Trump to be president — “he has run the most divisive and demagogic presidential campaign I can remember, preying on people’s prejudices and fears,” Bloomberg wrote in an op-ed Monday announcing his decision — but he doesn’t feel the need to stop Trump is a priority for himself.

“I don’t know that he feels the need to be out there. He’s not Mitt Romney trying to save the Republican Party,” the person familiar with his planning said, adding that as far as what Bloomberg does in the presidential race now, “the answer might be not much. He really moves on. When he’s done, he’s done.”

Bloomberg is the best-known independent in the country, the only one with a record of governing anything close to the 12 years he spent running New York’s government to largely rave reviews.

To many top Democrats and Republicans, Bloomberg and his team were the last to realize the non-transferability of his success — being infamous in large parts of the country mostly for fighting for gun control and smaller sodas wasn’t going to make him president.

In the Upper East Side townhouse headquarters of Bloomberg’s foundation where his top advisers met — Bloomberg’s orders from the beginning were to simultaneously gather the data and prepare a turn-key campaign that would have been ready to go by Tuesday morning — they talked themselves into believing there was a chance Bernie Sanders would swipe the nomination from Hillary Clinton.

“There was a moment where it seemed considerably more likely than it does today,” said Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg who worked on the planning.

At points, they worried more that it was the Republican race that wouldn’t be resolved by mid-March, when they were facing deadlines to get on the ballot if they were going to do it. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, whom Bloomberg lumped in with Trump in his op-ed, created an opportunity, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. John Kasich much less so.

They’d gotten as far as mapping out how Bloomberg would do against Sanders in Vermont, what would happen if no one got an Electoral College majority and the Constitution threw the decision to the House, where each state’s delegation would get one vote.

In a Trump versus Sanders head-to-head, they figured, Bloomberg would ride the centrist lane right up to the White House, getting him elected outright in November.

“Clinton-Trump-Bloomberg changed that dynamic,” Wolfson said. “What our data showed was that the high-water mark for us in that scenario was victory in states but not nearly enough to get to 270, but more than enough to throw it into the House of Representatives.”

They even considered what Antonin Scalia’s death and a 4-4 Supreme Court might mean.

“It only solidified in his mind that if the only path required a constitutional crisis, that probably wasn’t the best way to go,” said the person familiar with the planning.

Polls were conducted, staff was lined up, offices were opened, they even got as far as vetting former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen as a running mate.

But Bloomberg for President 2016 will likely more be remembered for all the speculation eagerly tweeted about by people involved with the operation.

“The two-party system that we operate in absolutely mitigates against a third-party race,” Wolfson said.

The data Bloomberg’s team put together showed that any path would kill Clinton and leave the Republican nominee largely untouched — even if that Republican was Trump. Clinton has extremely high negative numbers they found, but also extremely high loyalty among Democrats. Bloomberg would win states in three-way races, and turn them green on pollster Doug Schoen’s projected map, but they were all blue states. The red states stayed red, no matter how much money they figured they’d pump into pushing Bloomberg’s message and biography as the centrist independent businessman who gets things done but couldn’t be bought.

“For me, the lesson is that unless both parties nominate people who are really on the extremes, there is not sufficient space,” Wolfson said. “Our polling showed us pulling a fair number of Republican voters from Trump, but we were not drawing enough Democrats to get to 270.”

They tossed around $1 billion as a working number, but they all knew that if Bloomberg got in, he’d spend $2 billion or whatever else he needed to keep himself competitive and not embarrassed.

Bloomberg advisers say that at no point did they hear from the Clinton campaign, and certainly not from Trump.

Trump’s dig at Bloomberg for maybe not being as wealthy as projected, though, did cause some snickers.